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suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually.'"

I know this might be flamebait, but.
Java SUCKS for gaming. I wish both Java and Flash would disappear from gaming completely. Neither Java or Flash (excl. Shockwave) were built for gaming. Someone needs to come up with a multi-platform gaming dev platform - and as much as I hate Microsoft, kudos for giving it a shot.

It's true. Java is a language and a platform,.NET is a platform. In a lot of ways,.NET took the idea of Java and addressed some complaints, resulting in a better Java. No citation there, that's just opinion I see from time to time.

Java has an awful lot of segmentation due to all of the 3rd party stuff that was later integrated into Java, so multiple ways to do the same thing..NET has a huge library and multiple ways to do the same thing, but it's all in the library - nothing external. So if you see s

And there's the ability to make the application in.Net be pure native- something much like GCJ does for Java.

If you did a pure managed code version of a game with.Net/XNA, you'd have some of the same sorts of "fun" the Java stuff has. Keep in mind, though, you CAN make good games in Java- it's just harder and the limit ceiling on what you can/can't do is lower with it unless you build it to native with something like GCJ.

Would you care to explain why you feel that way? As someone who's programmed in both C++ and Java, I think the main reason would be the lack of native OpenGL support in Java, but that's not necessarily a fault of the language itself. Java is actually a pretty convenient language to work with. If vendors provided proper 3D/sound APIs, it seems it would be perfectly fine to program games with.

Flash is not very efficient resource-wise, but it is easy to deal with, making dealing with movement, transitions, collision detections and 2D visual effects very simple. Also, I have yet to see a tool as practical for animation as Flash.

Flash is not the scourge of the internet. It is just misused sometimes.

If you've written it right with the right abstractions for key pieces of the rendering, input, sound, etc. subsystems- YES.

If you've written it right by choosing OpenGL/OpenGL ES and then the other pieces picking things like FMOD, OpenAL, Miles, etc., you'll be able to target Windows, and probably the others- 3D would be "interesting" for the XBox (you'd need an OpenGL wrapper or abstract out the 3D rendering path...) but the rest would just drop on. Keep in mind, OpenGL ES is available in hardware acceler

I've played 3D stuff on my Nokia for a few years now as well, but it's really primitive - unfiltered textures, very few polygons before it slows down to the crawl...

XNA is a managed (.NET), higher-level layer on top of D3D which is fairly powerful, and also portable between PC, Xbox360, Zune HD, and now WinPhone. I think it's the portability that is going to be played on most here. Now, you obviously aren't going to make MW2 or Dragon Age that way, but I hear casual games are also a big market on PCs these days...

You can make a lot of fun, low power games. I imagine I could play a game on my phone, and then when I get home I could sync it up to a console or computer and continue where I left off when I was out and about.

3D on a phone isn't really the news here to be honest. It's the fact that it's done with XNA which means you can build for Windows, Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile with a negligible amount of per-platform code.

XNA like DirectX encompasses your graphics, math, audio libraries and so on so you can actually concentrate on writing the game, rather than writing code to support the creation of a game.

It's a good thing for those who just want to build games whatever the platform, because it means they get to use probably the easier professional grade development toolset yet, with a decent professional grade language, and then publish for 4 platforms from the start- 2 of which are pretty major.

The guy behind "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" released some stats lately stating he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week. With this news he can now port to Windows Mobile 7 phones.

If you just want to concentrate on writing game code, and would like to monetise that, it's probably the single best path for indies right now because you've got such a large potential userbase - Windows users (100s of millions), XBox 360 users (40mill), Windows 7 Phone users (potentially tens of millions), Zune users (all 4 of them).

I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really. Indies don't generally have the resources to create a massive multi-platform game from the off, and although XNA wont port straight to these platforms it does as I say provide indie developers an awesome and easy path to market. When they achieve success, porting to other platforms becomes less of a problem for them because they've got the income and experience needed to do it if they so choose. This is somewhat what happened with Popcap- they started out with just Flash and then Windows games, but their success was such that porting the likes of Bejewelled to every other possible platform became feasible to them.

I can assure you that there's patent coverage within that space that Microsoft holds ownership on.

Quickest way to see to it that you get sued over infringement, I'd say.

As it stands, having asset tool middleware isn't anything special- there's other toolchains for that available that everyone else seems to be using. I'll also note that unless you're talking a casual game or a specific range of games that would be good on a console, desktop, and handheld, you're unlikely to be concerning your

What exactly would they hold patent ownership on that they can't exercise already?

XNA mimics what's at the core of basically any game engine written in the last decade or two. If Microsoft were interested in such patent enforcement they'd have done it against much existing middleware by now, or perhaps even OpenGL if it was API specific. Besides, there are already Mono XNA implementations underway and have been for some time, so it's quite clear people can in fact produce FOSS implementations of XNA if they

Well, given that XNA is basically.NET with DirectX bindings (and a few other libraries), someone should sequestrate Miguel de Icaza and punch him repeatedly in the face until he accepts to port XNA on his Mono in exchange of his liberation. In fact, given how wilfully he ported Silverlight into Moonlight, we might even skip the whole punching steps and let him do the port on his own.

More seriously :- Mono is already a functional cross-platform.NET CLR/DLR implementation- Silverlight is already an example of some domain specific.NET implementation (Silverlight) ported to Mono- In case of DirectX calls being directly exposed in XNA, Wine project has already some DirectX to OpenGL/Pulse/et alii wrappers (lots of games are currently playable on Macs and Linux through Wine or Crossover)- The biggest chunk for making a Mac/Linux XNA port would be adapting the XNA specific classes to Mono

This might indeed work :- There are already efforts [monoxna.org] in that direction (which has already been successfully adapted on one Indie Project [monoxna.org])- I would definitely see a couple of "Google Summer of Code"-worthy projects to implement a few of the basics of this latest Windows Mobile-compatible XNA version.- Cross-platfrom Mono/XNA means instant support on all opensource-friendly platforms: Android, Maemo, webOS, Beagleboard/OpenPandora/TouchBook, (OpenMoko:-P)- That means that there could be also interest from the phone industry (specially the huge Android clan, but Palm has also shown interests efforts towards cross-platform development with their PDK)- That means industry-backed salaries could be used for such a port making it an easier effort.

Though, regarding Apple support, don't expect it to run on anything but jail-broken iPhone/iPod/iPad, just like with Flash. Apple doesn't want you to run anything which was not approved by Steve-God-Himself before ending up on the AppStore.

Advocating a wrapper that only results in performance problems for a performance-dependent application is a terrible, TERRIBLE idea

Well if the calls themselves were the most time-critical part, you would be right. The fact is that the most critical part is the rendering it self. Which is done on the graphic card or - to be more precise regarding today's subject - on the embed PowerVR of the Phone's OMAP.

Older phone had slow 3D because it was partly done in software. Modern embed platforms contain embed 3D Chips, so the performances are mostly hardware dependent. And given the pervasiveness of OMAPs and similar chips, there are only sma

You've got PowerVR, Tegra, Imageon (whatever Qualcomm's calling it now...), and Mali, all of which are very credible GPUs for mobile 3D support, all of which have SoC's in play or about to be with them in there. The one thing common to all of them? They're all using OpenGL ES right now.

Considering that you're not talking about a wrapper, per se, but rather an API layer that's similar enough to the Windows one that you can just drop an application on and run it.

Nice idea, but there's a minefield that won't get fixed unless the SCOTUS deep-sixes most software patents. You're going to touch on something that will most definitely infringe on one of MS' patents doing this sufficient to play games with. As such, it's kind of worthless to go there.

I agree, I was dissapointed too, shocked, stunned in fact. I agree it's not worthy of anything close to the money it made if I base my feelings on historic development of indie games

But that's really the point- XNA is such a great step forward for indies that even trash like that can make a small fortune. Developing, publishing and porting are so easy with it, even trash can make developers a fortune. If people want to pay for it then let them, as I say, it's great news for indies as it's a great path to ea

It costs $1. It is worth about that much. People would buy your games for that much back then too. Except there was no digital distribution to speak of back then, media costs would kill the enterprise.

he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week.

Either you'd made a typo there or I don't get something. Could you explain these figures? It doesn't add up for me. Is he selling for $31, MS taking $30, him $1? Or did you mean 30%?

Sure,I can game on my phone, but I don't. The battery honestly just can't take it. I like to have my phone do the phone stuff, I like that I can check the internet if I need to. What I don't like is having to recharge my phone every 4-6 hours because gaming/video's drain the battery.

When you (as in the clever people adding all this extra crap to phones) can actually make a battery that can handle all that stuff, then I'll be down to game on my cell phone.

MS started selling the game a full 3D document; No one notices oneMS is a complete 3D documentation, start selling the game; no one notices oneMS is a complete 3D documentation, will start selling the game, no one notices oneMS is a complete 3D documentation, sales of the game, everyone will begin notify oneMS is a complete 3D documentation, sales of the game, everyone begins to notice a single oneMS is a complete 3D docu

I'm all for giving Microsoft a chance with Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it) but as someone who has used phones & gadgets running Android, Symbian & Apple embedded OSes, as well as various incarnations of Windows Mobile on HTC and iPAQ devices, I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices. The rest "just work", Windows devices need rebooting once a month or so, they sometimes slow to a crawl occasionally for no readily apparent reason & there always deployed

I'm all for bashing Microsoft for its numerous failings, but we are talking about a mobile OS, completely rebuilt from the ground up, which is yet to be released. It completely breaks backward compatibility, has a completely new programming model and APIs (as far as Windows Mobile is concerned) and imposes strict requirements on the hardware, in stark contrast with past WM versions. In this case, any previous experience we've had with Window

I'm all for giving Microsoft a chance with Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it) but as someone who has used phones & gadgets running Android, Symbian & Apple embedded OSes, as well as various incarnations of Windows Mobile on HTC and iPAQ devices, I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices. The rest "just work", Windows devices need rebooting once a month or so, they sometimes slow to a crawl occasionally for no readily apparent reason & there always deployed far too bloated with no easy way of removing the trash you don't need.

Have you actually read anything about 7 Series? It's a complete reincarnation of WinMo.

Of course, whether it needs regular reboots or random slowdowns or not still remains to be seen. But MS seem to be going more towards the Apple route of locking down the core OS - this would be stupid if the fundamentals of the OS were crap.

Err, "Windows" is a trademark. The code on your Win7 machine is not the code on your mobile phone.

>The rest "just work",

As someone who has spent years using palm, then danger/hiptop, then winmo, and now iphone, I can tell you that none of these "just work." You just have a double standard because youre biased.

While Im certainly not one to defend WinMo, my previous phone was a Treo with WinMo that did a lot of the things 5 years ago that people rave about with iphone/android. WinMo didnt have an app store, but apps were easily found on the internet. Many free and without the blessing of any censorship board. Not to mention, Outlook/Activesync integration.

The "embedded" OS that they slapped their trademark on is rather not suitable for a large line of embedded tasks. Same goes for Embedded XP, etc. It's only sort-of useful on PDA's and somewhat painful at times on mobile phones. And, before you remark, I should point out that I do embedded development for a living.

I would have to concur with your assertion of "bias" on the GP poster's part, but I would say that the current crop of Maemo, Android, etc. phones do seem to work more along expected lines and s

You can also have as little of XP as you like, and you get to use Microsoft development tools, with which many thousands of programmers are comfortable. This means it's easy to find competent programmers in the first place, and it's easy to find people to maintain the code later, provided it's actually maintainable. Since it's XP you can use practically any hardware, and you can change it out later without anyone the wiser if you're clever about enclosure design and somewhat of a prognosticator regarding th

Windows Phone 7 will break compatibility with software written for previous versions of Windows Mobile. That's a very interesting fact that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide, but it's very important if you are willing to give it an opportunity.

That's a very interesting fact that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide

Pretty much every single story on WinPhohe7 mentioned that there will be no backwards compatibility. The announcement on the blog of the project's PM said so explicitly as well. Your definition of "tries very hard to hide" is rather curious...